Current diet tracking systems comprise software systems designed to run on mobile and other computing devices that are extremely tedious to use. These software systems all require a user to undergo the same lengthy process in which that user must: i) select breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack for meal placement, ii) type or voice transcribe (using the device microphone) the food name, iii) search for the food, iv) select the appropriate food from a long list of options, v) confirm or edit the food quantity and the quantity unit, and then repeat for every food in the meal to be tracked.
Importantly, to demonstrate the gross inefficiency of the aforementioned diet tracking systems one simply needs to add up the current number of steps required of users in order to track a five food meal. That number, without using any recent foods tracked data, is an astounding thirty-five steps. This is burdensome and inconvenient which detracts from the use of such systems. Further, current art that has not been applied in functional systems, while conceptualizing some limited automation to the diet tracking process if, and only if, a fuzzy search text match is found, also falls grossly short in providing any practical amount of efficiency improvement and food tracking accuracy for users.
It is desirable to provide systems and methods that address the foregoing and other problems with known approaches, and it is to this that the present invention is directed. For the sake of clarity, diet tracking can be defined as the process of logging an individual user's food eaten (e.g. spaghetti), including the associated food quantity (e.g. 1, 2, 3, etc.) and quantity unit (e.g. cup, ounce, etc.) and nutrition information for such food (e.g. 221 calories, 1 gram of fat, 43 grams of carbohydrates, 3 grams of fiber, etc.).